The Necessity of Using Social Media to Promote Your Website

Signaling a seismic shift in the way people discover and share content, Facebook has surpassed Google as the #1 most-visited website this week. While Google's search continues to send the most traffic online, the power of engaging an audience using social media continues to grow. Facebook and Twitter currently dominate social traffic, with Facebook users responsible for 44% of social sharing and Twitter users contributing a respectable 29%. As social sharing continues to grow, having a presence and engaging an audience in these channels will be a crucial part of promoting websites. Creating compelling content that users can easily share on their social networks is now as important as optimizing your content for search keywords.To give you a clear idea of how to better leverage social media as part of your online marketing strategy CMO has created an excellent infographic that outlines the current social media landscape. It outlines how effective each of the 10 major social media websites are for each of following categories:

Customer Communication

Brand Exposure

Traffic To Your Website

Search Engine Optimization

While Facebook and Twitter excel as communication and brand exposure tools, other popular platforms like Flickr, Digg, Youtube, StumbleUpon, Reddit and Delicious are more effective at driving traffic to your website and generating backlinks to assist in your SEO efforts. Social media promotion is more an art than a science but by taking the time and effort to develop useful content and cultivate relationships online, you will be in a good position to take advantage of the enormous power of social sharing. To view a larger version, you can also download the full-screen Social Landscape PDF.